Mosher's Gambit

Everybunny is familiar with the usual run of ideas

1. First they ignore you.
2. Then they ridicule you.
3. And then they attack you and want to burn you.
4. And then they build monuments to you

Having passed through stage 3 with Phil Jones, the ignorati are consumed with how not to get to 4, thus the Mosher gambit,

CRU data was requested by McIntyre for one purpose and one purpose only. To ascertain whether there was any "value added" by CRU as they had repeated and claimed. The purpose was not to create an "independent" assessment, although many of us have done that. In short we found what we expected to find: nothing, no substantive value added by their processing.

Of course some idiots expected that CRU had somehow cooked the data. This was never McIntyre's supposition. This was never my supposition. Quite the opposite. We expected that CRU was overselling they "value" that they added to the data, featherbedding if you like.

The tactic being to bury such silly claims in a large pile of offal so that others simply pass over the new insertion, rinse, repeat and as we all know, say it once and it is a habit, twice a revered tradition. But this is Rabett Run and the Rabetts RTFR.

In short this is arrant nonsense. Jones was the first to build a reliable global temperature record. The CRU, GISS and NOAA surface temperature records provide(d) reliable regional as well as global patterns of surface temperature change. Each of these (and the BEST and the RSS and UAH records as soon as they release their software to the public) have different advantages and disadvantages which are and have been discussed in the literature, and, sad to say distorted on several blogs with with Mosher is associated.

Now Eli could go on about the value of the CRU surface temperature record, but the Oxburgh committee summed it up

In the latter part of the 20th century CRU pioneered the methods for taking into account a wide range of local influences that can make instrumental records from different locations hard to compare. These methods were very labour intensive and were somewhat subjective. Much of this work was supported by the US Department of Energy and was published with the details of station corrections several times a year. Since the 1980s the Unit has done no more of this work and have concentrated on the merging and interpretation of data series corrected by others. There have been various analyses of similar publicly available data sets by different international groups. Although there are some differences in fine detail that reflect the differences in the analytical methods used, the results are very similar.

The Unit has devoted a great deal of effort to understanding how instrumental observations are best combined to derive the surface temperature on a variety of time and space scales. It has become apparent from a number of studies that there is elevation of the surface temperature in and around large cities and work is continuing to understand this fully.

Like the work on tree rings this work is strongly dependent on statistical analysis and our comments are essentially the same. Although there are certainly different ways of handling the data, some of which might be superior, as far as we can judge the methods which CRU has employed are fair and satisfactory. Particular attention was given to records that seemed anomalous and to establishing whether the anomaly was an artefact or the result of some natural process. There was also the challenge of dealing with gaps in otherwise high quality data series. In detailed discussion with the researchers we found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda. Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible. All of the published work was accompanied by detailed descriptions of uncertainties and accompanied by appropriate caveats. The same was true in face to face discussions.

We believe that CRU did a public service of great value by carrying out much time-consuming meticulous work on temperature records at a time when it was unfashionable and attracted the interest of a rather small section of the scientific community. CRU has been among the leaders in international efforts to determining the overall uncertainty in the derived temperature records and where work is best focussed to improve them.

The Unit has demonstrated that at a global and hemispheric scale temperature results are surprisingly insensitive to adjustments made to the data and the number of series included.

Whatever